A Tale Of Three Dollars!by Ramesh Mahadevan It was a cold, wintry night in Denver, USA. And it was god awful 4.00 a.m. My roommate's car was cutting through the fog and finally came to a stop by the curb of the Denver International Airport. I was going off to India, and thanks to the new security requirement, we were forced to be at the airport umpteen hours prior to departure. We were slowly unloading our cache of suitcases, when a shadowy figure crept up near our car and spoke in the typical, gratuitous American machismo voice. “Sir, keep moving. You can't park here. That is the security regulation.” “We are not parking, officer, we are simply taking out our baggage.” “You know the security regulations. You can't stop there or you will be towed. Get moving, now!” he barked, as I was fumbling around looking for my gloves. He had moved to within three inches of my face and I was getting angrier by the nanosecond. Jesus Christ! Which terrorist is dumb enough to spend ten minutes by the curbside of a major airport, taking out his terrorist weapons? And that too in full view of a security critter? But I wasn't going to argue with our FBI-incarnate there. I knew the country was in 'Orange Alert', which basically meant that any brown-skinned person who had the temerity to show up on a city street could in principle be rounded up and harassed by any police type. I motioned my friend to push off and proceeded to gather my three pieces of luggage and started to walk toward a door. The security guy too started walking away, somewhat aimlessly, as if he was enjoying the bone-numbing cold. My suitcases seemed to weigh two tons and I could not get all three of them to move in the same direction. Why do I carry so much of stuff every time I go to India? And why do I willingly carry other people's this and that to be delivered in India? It wasn't as if I was on a pleasure trip. As a matter of fact, I was visiting my sick dad in the hospital. I cursed and cursed. The airport door seemed miles away. Just when it was getting to be completely hopeless, I saw a huge line of airport trolleys, the supermarket type buggies, parked neatly in a row along the wall. I managed to drag all my belongings in one super-human effort and got near the pushcart row. I tried to yank the last carriage. It wouldn't release. I wrestled with it a few more times and then I realized the darned thing was locked in its place. I walked around to the head of the trolley chain, where a little sign told me that in three easy steps I could get a trolley and now, please fork out three dollars. Three dollars? I fished in my wallet for three lousy dollars and of course, I only had large bills. Aw shucks! The machine, of course, wasn't designed to make change for ten-dollar bills. There was not a soul around and even the security beefcake had gone off to the other end of the airport, barely visible through the fog. I just about gave up. For heaven's sake! Then another shadowy figure walked by, as if god-sent, wearing a terrible-looking winter jacket. I quickly waved it to stop, “Sir, can you make change for ten dollars? I need to get one of 'em carts.” The 'sir' kindly stopped. “I don't know, dude. Lemme check.” He did have change, thank god. But the stupid machine kept rejecting all the dollar bills we were feeding it. By now, I was absolutely furious. Why don't these guys let the travelers use these carts for free? Around the world, even in all the so-called third world, fourth world countries, you don't pay for the stupid cart. Why would they want to make a quick buck out of travelers' misery here, in this land of milk and honey? I cursed whomever that owned those carts. The cold was biting into me. The Good Samaritan took up the battle on my behalf -- he banged the machine, kicked it, pulled the cart and finally managed to unshackle one of them, and gently pushed it toward me and walked off before I could even complete my 'Thank You'. What an India trip this already is!
My father was sicker than I figured. He was spending his second month in the hospital going in and out of the Intensive Care Unit. What started out as a heart failure, eventually resulted in a lot of other systems failing. His sugar level would randomly fluctuate. His Parkinson's has been getting worse and there were tubes and catheters coming out of his body. He needed piped oxygen and his feeding was done through another tube. He was in a mild coma and didn't even recognize me. Since there were so many complications, we decided to opt for 'special nursing care' -- basically, to have private nurses in our room round the clock. The doctor spoke to someone, who spoke to someone else, and in a few minutes, in walked a gracefully dressed petite woman, who introduced herself as Unni Mary. She was a temporary nurse in the hospital and would gladly stay the nights, looking after my father. “I used to be a full time nurse, but after I had the baby I have not been really working full time.” “Won't you need to be with your baby in the nights?” I asked. “No, no. He will be fine with my husband,” she said in a Kerala accent. “My baby is nearly a year and a half old now. He should be okay. I need the money from such moonlighting. This Christmas is already almost over. At least for the next Christmas we should get some good stuff for ourselves. We really need a fridge, at least a second-hand one.” She had no idea how much special duty nurses got paid for a night. “I would say about a hundred and fifty rupees a night,” she said. “I will find out from the Matron.” That's it? A mere three dollars? The same three dollars that I paid for the five-minute pleasure of hauling a pushcart at the Denver airport? She had probably figured that even at that rate, if she worked ten or fifteen days, (she knew my father had been there for a while) she would be able to pocket quite a bit of money. She started work right away. The very first night she was on duty, I woke up in the middle of the night because we saw heavy machinery being brought in. It was the suction machine. My father was wheezing and they were tethering the suction tube to his mouth, so they could clear his throat. “He was choking, sir,” Unni Mary informed us. “If you don't want to see this procedure, you can go out. I will call you after they are done.” I stayed in the room. It turned out that my father was choking on his own saliva. His Parkinson's condition was so bad he was unable to do a simple thing like swallowing his own spit. Nurse Unni Mary was alert enough to save him from a near emergency situation. Thank god for her! I was so moved by the whole thing I was contemplating how best to reward her. The next day we inquired around and found out that the amount she had asked for -- one hundred and fifty rupees -- was grossly below the market rate. It was more like three hundred and fifty rupees. She was quite embarrassed by this revelation and by all our words of gratitude. We bought a nice gift for her baby and also invited her and her husband over for dinner at our place -- as soon as my father got better and we went home. It so happened that my father passed away the next week, of a massive cardiac arrest. I never saw nurse Unni Mary again.
Let us fast-forward to a distant future -- say five years from today. That would be the year when nurse Unni Mary finally bought her dream fridge for Christmas. Not only that, her savings was substantial enough she even bought a little gold chain for her husband and a bracelet for her child. That was also the year the Nobel prize in Economics was awarded to an American professor (no doubt from the University of Chicago) for his work on 'Random Offering of Limited Open Market Resources for Consumers and Optimization of such Tools in Sub-Optimal Environment' and the professor had specifically given the Airport Pushcarts system and their pricing as an example of his multi-variate, supercomputer analysis. That was also the year President George W. Bush won the Nobel Peace prize for starting the Iraq war. |